This was former Speaker of the House John Boehner, who sprung himself from one of the world's most miserable jobs in which he had to deal with some of the world's most miserable people. ("Mr. Speaker? I have Congressman Gohmert on the line, and there's a Ms. Bachmann holding on Line Two.") Regardless of what you think about the shorts, and I think it takes a lot of guts to film yourself wearing them, this is a man at ease with himself and the world. And the fact that it probably makes Paul Ryan miserable is just a happy sidelight to it.

The other night, this John Boehner took the stage at a healthcare conference in Florida, and he gave them the true word on the preposterous exercise his former colleagues have undertaken as regards the Affordable Care Act. From NBC News:

Boehner also said Obamacare was made more likely to survive in some form due to the sheer difficulty of getting lawmakers to rally behind an alternative version. "In the 25 years I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time, agreed on what a healthcare proposal should look like. Not once," Boehner said during a panel conversation with former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society forum. "They'll fix Obamacare. I shouldn't call it repeal and replace because that's not what's going to happen. They're basically going to fix the flaws and put a more conservative box around it."

"And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about, 'Repeal, repeal, repeal, yeah, we'll do replace, replace,' I start laughing. Because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it. And secondly, as I told some of the Republican leaders when they asked, I said, 'If you pass repeal without replace, you'll never pass replace, because they will never, ever agree on what the bill should be.' Perfect always becomes the enemy of the good. And so we've got to marry them together. That's the only chance was have to get it done. That's why it's taking a lot longer than people anticipated."

They can't do it, at least not without utterly immolating themselves politically. (Those town halls are a window into electoral hell.) You can't make law by saying we're going to keep all the stuff you love but without all the stuff you hate, but that makes the stuff you love work. That was absurd throughout the Republican primary season, and it's absurd now, and it will be absurd when (or if) Ryan or, god forbid, the president* come up with plans of their own.

Back in 1993, when the list of things he's been wrong about was still in triple digits, Butcher's Bill Kristol got one thing right. Bill Clinton got elected president at least partly on his promise that he would fix the broken healthcare system to which many Republicans currently propose to return us. Kristol's advice to Republicans was to fight whatever bill emerged from the process, and his reasons were pure realpolitik. From TPM:

But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan--and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.

Even then, at the time Kristol wrote this memo, the Clinton health-care plan already was on the ropes. But he was sharp enough to realize that, if it had succeeded, then the parts that people liked would make the plan virtually immortal and that, if that happened, then the Republicans would lose whatever grip they had on the working class. That is the wall into which the Republicans presently are running with the Affordable Care Act.

Back when he was the keeper of Bedlam, John Boehner knew this, too. Remember his famous "Hell, No!" oration when it looked like the ACA was going to pass?

He looked like he was about to have an aneurysm right there in the well of the house. He knew that, once a generation of young people realized they could stay on their parents' health plan, and that, once a generation of hemophiliacs realized that they could not be denied insurance on the basis of their pre-existing condition, then the ACA was going to be set in concrete. So he tried to yell it to pieces.

But now he's a cool dude, riding down the road of life in his recreational vehicle. He sees things clearly, and he's left the crazy people far back in his rear view mirror. I keep waiting for him to walk around whistling.

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